I agree i think the knockback and AOE dmg from cannons should be reduced, real life cannon balls only damaged exactly what they hit. and explosive cannonballs should be reserved for the likes of legendary boats and end game play.

Everyone loves a good tower defense game, i could play them for hours.

First thing to do is to verify the files through steam, if that doesn't work, re-log into steam. if all else fails delete the local files and re-install pixel piracy. Beware the new patch will probably break any saves you have.

Their is just so much about games its very hard to just get started. as it take no less that 5 different fields to come together to make one game.

Games are often all about efficiency, knowing how to store data and access it again. logic loops like "for" and "while". when to cache data and when not too saves on ram(small games only take up 100MB or less,so go cache crazy". and getting to grips with data storage like, "Lists", "Arrays","trees"

An example of some of these in use would be a game coding design called pooling. creating a new object takes way to long when you have 20 guns all spawning 100's of bullets. so create a few thousand bullets at the start of the game and put them into a list. when a gun fires it asks for the next available bullet using a quick linear search of the list(or a pointer thats already pointing at the next one). take that bullet move it to your gun position and shoot it out. after a given time move that bullet back to the list and remove it from the game area so its ready for someone else to call on it at anytime.

Some of these things take people years to fully understand. so don't expect more that being able to rotate a few boxes and maybe change their colour at first. but keep trying and hopefully in a few years you might grind out something playable.

hopefully that doesn't put a dampener on your spirits. I'm not a professional these are just some things I've learned from trying to make games myself.

Pixel piracy i believe is made in Unity pro. It uses c# and a form of javascript. their is a unity free edition, its exactly the same as unity pro except for some features like dynamic lighting that make a game feel and look professional.

Plenty of online tutorials to get you started. as for the pixelation, that is all just art work.

A great place to start is with the "gamer to game developer" series. google "GTGD".